{"id":21894,"date":"2023-05-02T04:30:10","date_gmt":"2023-05-02T12:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2023\/05\/02\/news-15625\/"},"modified":"2023-05-02T04:30:10","modified_gmt":"2023-05-02T12:30:10","slug":"news-15625","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2023\/05\/02\/news-15625\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple, platform security, and the next big war"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

When Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2016 warned of a cybersecurity war<\/a>, he was specifically discussing the pressure Apple then faced to create back doors on its platforms so law enforcement could snoop on users. \u00a0<\/p>\n

He was championing encryption and opposing the creation of designer vulnerabilities that can be exploited by any entity that knows they exist. Since then, we\u2019ve seen a cancerous tumult of surveillance as a service<\/a> that companies such as the NSO Group break out<\/a>, each of them using the kind of hard-to-find flaws<\/a> governments may insist on platform providers creating.<\/p>\n

These back doors make no one safe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Worse still, we\u2019ve also seen that they do eventually leak beyond the relative constraints of eye-wateringly expensive private digital spook services. Take the recent appearance of Atomic macOS Stealer<\/a>, a fee-based Mac attack “service” that can be used to exfiltrate critical data, including passwords, documents, images and more. It\u2019s available to anyone with a few dollars to spare.<\/p>\n

This is not good. It is nowhere near good.<\/p>\n

With nation states at loggerheads, it\u2019s sadly predictable that heaps of cash will be thrown at cracking security on any platform, not just Apple\u2019s \u2014 and to protect against this most vendors are working towards systems that work like Apple\u2019s Rapid Security Response.<\/p>\n

That solution has been developed so that Apple can swiftly distribute critical software updates across its entire ecosystem of devices. The idea is that the company can patch critical vulnerabilities as swiftly as possible once they’ve been identified and a patch made.<\/p>\n

As Cook observed, such rapid security remediations are mandatory in an increasingly complex threat environment. Speaking to Time<\/em> all those years ago, he was already aware of the threat and the extent to which it has changed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith hacking getting more and more sophisticated, the hacking community has gone from the hobbyist in the basement to huge, sophisticated companies that are essentially doing this, or groups of people or foreign agents inside and outside the United States. People are running huge enterprises off of hacking and stealing data. So yes, every software release we do, we get more and more secure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cYou can\u2019t have a back door that says good people only. It doesn\u2019t work that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

A lot has happened in the last seven years. The company\u2019s security teams have raised their game<\/a> with a flotilla of protective charms to secure the company\u2019s platforms. These span everything from Declarative Device Management<\/a> to Lockdown Mode<\/a>, \u00a0and encompass APIs such as the Endpoint Security Framework\u00a0already in use by MDM vendors<\/a> to give devices more real-time situational awareness\u00a0of attacks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course, awareness is one thing. But no force in the field can do much with that information unless it can respond flexibly and fast to any identified attack. The prevalence of nation- and near-nation-state attacks that exploit zero-day flaws requires platform vendors be ready to respond swiftly.<\/p>\n

This is what Apple\u2019s now-emerging Rapid Security Response<\/a> system is for.<\/p>\n

Rapid Security Response updates are applied automatically by default. You can ensure the protection is enabled in the Security Responses & System Files setting inside Software Updates>Automatic Updates on iPhones, iPads, or in Automatic Updates inside Software Updates on the Mac. In the future, your system should download and install these updates when they appear.<\/p>\n

This is war, and make no bones about it, Rapid Security Response is an important part<\/a> of Apple\u2019s security front line. It\u2019s the tactical fast response point at which emerging threats will be opposed by increasingly agile security response teams. As new vulnerabilities are identified, security patches will be rolled out swiftly to plug them up.<\/p>\n

The process is clearly more complex than it sounds. The protection was announced last summer, but only saw real action this week and there were unknown initial distribution problems, which appear to have been resolved.<\/p>\n

Security is a constant ebb and flow.<\/p>\n

Digital terrorists will keep trying to overcome Apple\u2019s protections as fast as it puts them in place. With this in mind, old notions of platform-based security superiority need to be abandoned in favor of a more cynical and inherently more depressing outlook of threat awareness. In this picture, every organization must build in additional redundancies, prepare backup and remediation plans, and deeply consider every public facing element of their stack, from access, to cloud, to email, to zero trust and beyond.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not enough to prepare against potential threats; experts warn business must get ready for inevitable attacks. Not only this, but the coming quantum computing-driven security test<\/a> will require incredibly fast platform based remediation and response to emerging threats. That’s why Rapid Security Response has become the new front.<\/p>\n

Are your systems on the right side of the line? And how will Apple extend these protections at WWDC<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Please follow me on\u00a0Mastodon<\/a>, or join me in the\u00a0AppleHolic\u2019s bar & grill<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Apple<\/em>\u00a0Discussions<\/em><\/a>\u00a0groups on MeWe.<\/em><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/category\/security\/index.rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n
\n

When Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2016 warned of a cybersecurity war<\/a>, he was specifically discussing the pressure Apple then faced to create back doors on its platforms so law enforcement could snoop on users. \u00a0<\/p>\n

He was championing encryption and opposing the creation of designer vulnerabilities that can be exploited by any entity that knows they exist. Since then, we\u2019ve seen a cancerous tumult of surveillance as a service<\/a> that companies such as the NSO Group break out<\/a>, each of them using the kind of hard-to-find flaws<\/a> governments may insist on platform providers creating.<\/p>\n

To read this article in full, please click here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[11062,10643],"tags":[2211,10480,11721,10403,10554,714,24580],"class_list":["post-21894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computerworld","category-independent","tag-apple","tag-ios","tag-ipad","tag-macos","tag-mobile","tag-security","tag-small-and-medium-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}